The Myth That Made the Modern World

How the Second World War Became the New Religion of the West

Every civilization is built upon a myth. Not a fiction, but a frame—a sacred narrative that defines the borders of good and evil, maps the structure of the world, and carves meaning into the chaos of time. For the modern West, that myth is the Second World War.

We do not merely study that war; we worship it. It is the holy text of the present order, the last moral certainty in an otherwise relativistic age. The world we inhabit was birthed in its ashes, and our institutions, both supranational and domestic, trace their legitimacy to its outcome. Our moral reflexes, our political taboos, and our cultural self-image each flow from the narrative established in the aftermath of that conflict. It is the one story every schoolchild knows by heart, the one event in which history is always taught with the verdict already rendered, where objectivity is not merely discouraged but actively punished. Above all, it is a moral fable: a tale of Good overcoming Evil, of light prevailing over darkness, of universal brotherhood triumphing over the tribal instincts of blood and soil.

But it is not history; it is myth in the most destructive sense of the word, not a noble fiction that elevates a people, but a sacred distortion that imprisons them. It has become, in effect, a new religion. And like all true religions, it governs not only belief, but morality, identity, and destiny.

Nietzsche wrote that God is dead, not as provocation but as diagnosis. He did not mean that the divine had vanished, but that the metaphysical architecture which once upheld Western life, the shared horizon of meaning and the sacred order of value, had collapsed. What followed was not freedom but vacancy. The Second World War did not reverse this decline; it cemented it. In its aftermath, modern Western man, cut off from tradition and denied transcendence, became vulnerable to new idols. As Heidegger warned, the loss of Being would drive man toward technics, abstraction, and collective illusions, giving rise to an age in which truth is displaced by narrative and destiny is reduced to management.

It was in this vacuum that the myth of the Good War arose, not merely as historical interpretation but as surrogate transcendence. It began as myth but did not remain myth. It became the sacred event of a post-Christian West, the Passion narrative of a secular faith. Sin was redefined as ancestral pride, salvation as submission, and the highest moral ideal became the erasure of distinction, since distinction is the foundation of identity, and identity the recognition of difference. The West unmoored itself from its gods and raised a new religion in their place.

Within this creed, the Second World War is remembered not as a geopolitical conflict, but as a holy war. According to the myth, the war was fought to liberate the world from tyranny, racism, and barbarism. It was a righteous crusade to stop a madman bent on planetary conquest, racial extermination, and totalitarian rule. In this telling, the Allies become selfless guardians of peace and justice, defenders of the weak, liberators of the oppressed, and champions of universal dignity.

What is left untold, what is buried or ignored, is the record of Soviet mass murder, the incineration of entire cities by firebombing, and the systematic rape of millions of women by victorious armies. These details are either omitted or minimized because the moral arc must remain unbroken, and the myth demands that the victors be pure, untarnished, beyond reproach. The enemy, in contrast, must be absolute—not merely defeated, but demonized, rendered metaphysically evil, so that the cause against him may be remembered as absolutely good.

And thus a devil was fashioned—a single man transfigured into a supernatural emblem of madness, hatred, and genocide. He is no longer treated as a historical figure but as a totem of eternal sin, a symbol summoned to silence dissent and to terrify those who stray from orthodoxy. To question immigration policy, to express loyalty to one’s race, to observe demographic change with unease is enough to invite his ghost. The Nazi, whether real or imagined, is now the eternal enemy of the modern order—not a threat to nations, but to the abstract idea of equality upon which the postwar West has staked its soul.

Here emerges the second foundational myth, inseparable from the first: the myth that all human beings are equal, not only in dignity before the law or under God, but in cognitive capacity, temperament, moral instinct, and creative potential. It insists that race, sex, culture, and nation are illusions or social constructs, that history and biology are hateful inventions, and that all observable disparities must be explained not by difference, but by oppression. This myth is not offered as aspiration or principle, but as absolute truth, one that demands unwavering faith even in the face of empirical evidence, daily experience, and common sense. To notice difference is to commit a kind of blasphemy; to act upon it is treated as a moral crime.

The two myths reinforce each other in a mutually sustaining loop. The myth of the Good War provides the moral alibi for the myth of equality, while the myth of equality breathes contemporary meaning into the memory of the war. We are told that millions died to prove a single moral proposition: that there are no enduring distinctions among peoples, that all are interchangeable, and that pride, borders, and identity are preludes to catastrophe. Because this double myth is the foundation of the current regime, it cannot be questioned. If the war was not about the triumph of universal values, if the enemy was not uniquely evil, then the entire postwar order is exposed as illegitimate—a revelation that those in power cannot afford to permit.

But the truth is simpler and far more tragic. The war was not a global moral awakening, but a clash of empires, a continuation of unresolved struggles from the century prior, and the culmination of a European Civil War, a fratricidal brother-war waged with unprecedented cruelty by every side involved. Its causes lay in diplomatic treachery, ideological extremism, and territorial ambition. Its consequences were not peace and liberty, but division, famine, occupation, and the subjugation of half of Europe, the seedbed of Western man, behind the barbed wire of a new tyranny. The war did not inaugurate a new era of freedom. It marked the collapse of Western self-confidence, the twilight of its spiritual vitality, and the beginning of its long moral disintegration.

In the decades that followed, the peoples of Europe and their descendants abroad were taught not to cherish their heritage, but to apologize for it. Every expression of loyalty to tradition, to ancestry, to historical continuity, has been recast as dangerous. Every appeal to order, hierarchy, or cultural memory is now met with the same panicked refrain: “This is how it starts.” You are told you are Hitler. You are dangerous. You must be silenced. The myth, in other words, does not protect; it punishes. It does not inspire; it cripples. It tells European man that he may exist only as a penitent, that his past is a burden, and that his future must consist of demographic erasure, racial replacement, and the deafening silence of total submission.

In this moral framework, pride is forbidden. Not aggression, not supremacy, but pride itself, the simple and natural feeling of belonging to something ancient, beautiful, and one’s own. That alone is now impermissible for the White man. All other peoples are allowed such sentiment; indeed, they are encouraged to cultivate it. But he is told to disown himself, to forget his dead, and to welcome his own disappearance as a moral duty.

This cannot continue. Not because we seek revenge or dominion, but because no living people can endure when bound to a myth that teaches them to despise their ancestors and deny their identity. A society cannot thrive on guilt alone. A culture cannot flourish when every root is treated as a crime scene. The myth of the Good War is no noble epic, but a funerary mask draped over a civilization that has lost faith in itself. It replaced gods with ghosts, turned fathers into tyrants, and cast heroes as demons. It is a total inversion of all that is good and beautiful. It condemned the very foundations of identity, our history, our race, and proclaimed them cursed.

To recover what has been lost, the myth must be broken. Not merely revised, but buried. We must tell the forbidden truths. We must examine the past, not to romanticize, but to understand—free from the moral hysteria that treats historical inquiry as sedition. The war did not validate liberalism. It did not crown democracy or prove the superiority of diversity. It proved only that modern warfare is ruthless and that even those who claim victory may emerge spiritually defeated.

What we inherited was not a shining future but a smoldering aftermath, a system of institutions and ideologies designed to prevent us from ever remembering who we were. But memory is stronger than fear, and from memory, new myths can be born.

The way forward lies not in denial but in creation, not in forgetting but in forging anew. We must rise again as a people who remember who they are and refuse to be diminished. A people defined not by guilt but by greatness, not trapped in sameness but moved by distinction. The future will belong to those who remember.

We need new myths. Myths not of submission but of restoration, not of grievance but of glory, not stories that demand our erasure but stories that summon us to rise.

We must become again what we once were: heirs of Rome, sons of Europe, builders of worlds, and one day conquerors of stars.

Let the old myths die. Let a new world begin.